Full stream ahead? The brave new world of cinemagoing

The 21st century has seen a revolution in how we consume cinema, from streaming a movie the day it’s released to forking out for a plush boutique experience. How did we get here – and how do we navigate the new landscape?

Tom Lamont puts his feet up at Everyman’s Screen on the Green in Islington, London.
Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose for the Observer

Full stream ahead? The brave new world of cinemagoing

The 21st century has seen a revolution in how we consume cinema, from streaming a movie the day it’s released to forking out for a plush boutique experience. How did we get here – and how do we navigate the new landscape?

On a recent visit to a Curzon cinema in London I sat (lay, really) on a steeply pitched chair that had been upholstered in red fur. Outside in the lobby, the snacks for sale included prosecco-laced ice lollies and popcorn flavoured with specific French cheeses; I chose a wedge of iced sponge cake that was on display under a cloche. Inside the screening room, I wasn’t the only one clacking tableware while we waited for the feature – Woody Allen’s Café Society– to start.

A pre-film advert played, promoting the Curzon’s app. Audiences were advised that, next time, they could simply stay at home and use their phones to stream selected newly released films direct to their TVs. Café Society had a 1930s setting, a jazz soundtrack, Allen’s usual Windsor font in the credits. But the preamble to it had been powerfully, pungently modern, illustrating the lavishing-up of many cinemas and the spread of home-streaming services, developments that have come to characterise movie‑watching in 2016.

As Allen’s film played I lay on the near-horizontal, watching it down my nose and trying not to fall asleep during the slow bits like an old man in front of the snooker – asking myself how we’d got here. To cinema seats resembling pool loungers. To phones that with the right software could call up hundreds of thousands of feature films. Just under a third of the UK population now streams films and this year sales of digitally streamed or downloaded movies outstripped sales of DVDs for the first time.

As traditional behaviour has changed, so has tradition: that well-grooved route for a movie, for instance, from cinema to DVD to telly, is now crisscrossed and complicated by internet-enabled detours. Last autumn, the independent British film 45 Years was made available to stream on the same day it premiered in cinemas. And in this way it took a robust £1m at the UK box office.

Dozing in the screening of Café Society, expensively sugared and with a preposterous little garden of legroom to unfurl into, and now clued up to the option to skip the cinema entirely next time in favour of a stream, I thought about how that term “box office” and how it was more unhelpful, more figurative, than ever. How had we come to watch the way we watched?

I went to see my first Woody Allen on the big screen in the summer of 2000. That was a real rite-of-passage outing – to see Sweet and Lowdown, the director’s eccentric ode to Prohibition-era jazz musicians, starring Sean Penn and Samantha Morton. The choice was a friend’s: I had to be persuaded. I was 18 at the time but by no means finished negotiating the borderland between teenage and adult tastes and I still favoured films with bangs and airborne car crashes and orchestra-scored baddie kills. I could be persuaded to go outside the action genre, but drama usually had to mean time travel and comedy a steady rate of jokes about penises. Sweet and Lowdown, about a virtuoso guitarist called Emmet (Penn) and his laundress wife, Hattie (Morton), seemed a terrible prospect.

Inside the screening room, people were drinking wine. Wine!

We went, not to one of our usual city-size multiplexes in the retail parks of north London, or to the run-down three-screen Odeon in near-ish Muswell Hill, but to a cinema I’d never visited before – the Barbican in the City. I remember noting with alarm, taking in the Barbican’s lifts and cloakrooms, its muted, theatre-like best-behaviour crowd waiting in the lobby. I complained to my friend. Why didn’t the Barbican have nachos? Or the tarry yellow cheese liquid that went on the nachos? Coke came in a glass and in what seemed a comically small measure. Inside the screening room, people were drinking wine. Wine!

Even to the regular Barbican crowd, back then, some of this must have seemed like outlier stuff, an unconventionally grown-up cinema experience, at least when compared with the bolshier, brighter nights out offered by the Odeons, ABCs and UCIs that then dominated. As Edward Humphrey, digital director at the British Film Institute, explained to me recently, the retail-park multiplexes haven’t really declined. (At the end of 2015 the UK had 4,046 screens in 751 cinemas, a figure that was up, slightly, on the year before.) What has changed in the last decade or so is that the smaller, urban cinemas, in tandem with the public’s idea “of what constitutes a cinema”, have evolved. These cinemas, said Humphrey, had started explicitly selling “an evening out experience”.

Catharine Des Forges, director of the Independent Cinema Office, said this move towards “the boutique-y” was really a matter of survival. By the middle of the 00s, new forms of media were competing for people’s attention; cinema attendance began to dip. Certain venues, and in particular the smaller independent chains, could not reduce ticket prices and still turn a profit so they tried to work the opposite strategy – go grander and increase the frills. “These cinemas had to become more of a destination, like going to the theatre,” said Des Forges. “They became treat-y.”

The cinema-going public, or at least that part of it willing or able to pay for tickets in the £15-£20 range, seemed to approve. In its end-of-year accounts for 2015, the Everyman chain, self-consciously sleek, a major player in the new age of boutique film-showing, reported an annual rise in revenue of 44%, from £14m to £20.3m. For a bunch of Britons, the experience of going to see a movie was coming to be associated less with the nacho and its cheese liquid, more about waiter-serviced sofas, fancier upholstery – and emptier wallets, most likely, as the credits rolled. My cruddy local Odeon in Muswell Hill, renowned for its frayed and caved-in chairs, its carpeting of old popcorn kernels and Opal Fruit wrappers, became one of the growing number of Everymans. These days, there are five kinds of red available at the bar and puddings served in jam jars. Terence Rattigan plays sometimes get beamed in from the National Theatre.

The Everyman Cinema on the Great North Road, Barnet, London. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

But all this change was still to come in 2000. When I left the screening room at the Barbican, I was a filmgoer transformed. Sweet and Lowdown – bloody loved it! And for no obvious reason I could make out. It was twinkly, twee, strangely paced, without knob gags or car chases and with only one sustained burst of cinematic action, when Penn smashed his antique guitar against a lamp post. But I loved it inexplicably as great art will make you love it inexplicably and all at once realised that films outside the narrow conditions I’d allowed for could be charming. In the days after the screening, I hit Our Price or Virgin Megastores to buy a few older Woody Allens on VHS. Then I settled in for the standard six months to wait to be able to buy Sweet and Lowdown on VHS too.

This was how it was: a film had a theatrical release, then everything went terribly quiet for a full six months before it showed up on the high street on video or (marvel!) DVD. Another year of patient Radio Times-scouring and it might appear on Sky. Another year and it might come on terrestrial TV. At the time, this felt like a pretty luxurious set-up, particularly as anyone a generation or two older would always remind you, as you tended your movie collection, how much harder it was to see movies before the revolution of VHS.

Actually, something was brewing, that summer in 2000, which would usher in the next movie-watching revolution. In June, the rental chain Blockbuster announced an ambitious partnership with a broadband provider to offer 500 movies over the internet by the end of the year. Blockbuster was about a decade away from filing for bankruptcy protection (in the US) at the time; closer to its own famous demise was the company Blockbuster had entered into partnership with – Enron, the too-big-to-fail firm that failed so spectacularly in 2001. The two companies’ fantastic notion to stream movies online came to nothing. But the idea was sound, and revolutionary, soon to be chased into reality by others.

The launch and popularity-explosion of YouTube, in 2005, familiarised the public with the idea of streaming short videos on their computers. Later, in the UK, the 2007 introduction of the BBC’s iPlayer service accustomed people to watching longer programming in the same way. “Video on demand”, or VOD, became the industry’s accepted term for streaming movies. Efe Cakarel, who founded the VOD service Mubi in 2007, told me the technology that enabled it had been around for while; what changed was “audience behaviour… [People] needed to get used to their idea of watching feature-length media on their computers.”

Netflix, then a rent-by-post subscription service that traded in tangible DVDs, joined the streaming market in 2007. Amazon bought a rival service, LoveFilm, and rebranded it Amazon Prime. (Both Netflix and Amazon have since moved into the production of their own films and TV programmes. Last year, while filming Café Society, Woody Allen was also working on a TV series for Amazon called Crisis in Six Scenes.)

In the UK, Sky developed its own VOD service, as did the Curzon group, which launched Curzon Home Cinema in 2010. In 2013, the BFI unveiled the BFI Player; the institute was openly concerned, Edward Humphrey said, that “if we didn’t embrace that change [towards streaming], we’d be left disconnected from an audience that was evolving in their tastes, their expectations, their use of technology”.

At the Curzon, as Café Society wound towards its conclusion, I decided to conduct an experiment. When I got home I’d stream as many Woody Allen films as I could, via as many different platforms as were available. Maybe I’d learn something large and profound about our consumption of film in 2016. Maybe I’d only finally get some value out of a dormant Netflix account I’d signed up for, years earlier, in order to watch the first season of House of Cards.

And why wait to get home? Outside the cinema, I hopped on to the No 19 bus and sat down on the empty upstairs deck. I downloaded the Netflix app using the phone’s 4G connection and browsed the choice of Allens to watch. There were plenty. Annie Hall(1977), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Radio Days (1987), Match Point (2005). I chose the most recent film available, To Rome with Love (2012), which I’d missed when it came out.

Netflix converted itself into a streaming service after starting out by posting DVDs to customers. Photograph: Elise Amendola/AP

I had no headphones with me, so I let the sound play through the phone’s small speakers. The connection held steady as we drove into London’s West End and for a good while the bus made a pretty decent mobile cinema, at least until some subtitled scenes in Italian, which required some serious squinting at the 4in screen. In Knightsbridge, I met a character played by Jesse Eisenberg; at Piccadilly Circus his love interest, Ellen Page. In Charing Cross Road, a group of passengers came to sit upstairs and I felt self-conscious playing the film aloud. When Page delivered a risque line of dialogue to Eisenberg – “As great as the orgasms were with Victoria, they were stronger with Jamal” – I panicked and pocketed the phone.

At home, I signed up to more services, subscribing to ones I already knew about, including Amazon Prime, Mubi, the BFI and Curzon, and downloading apps and software for all the competing firms I could find: Wuaki.tv, Now TV (a budget service run by Sky), TalkTalk TV and Chili Cinema. I bought a little gadget called a Chromecast, made by Google, which allows me to redirect streamed content from my phone or laptop to my TV. I typed “Woody Allen” into a lot of search bars and usually found lots of options – Blue Jasmine (2013) on iTunes and Wuaki and Chilli, Bananas (1971) on Netflix and iTunes and Amazon. Everyone had 2004’s Melinda and Melinda, but only Now TV and Sky Go were streaming 2015’s Irrational Man.

I spoke to Philip Mordecai, director of Curzon Home Cinema, and Efe Cakarel at Mubi, who explained that the reason the choice of films splattered across the various platforms is uneven and inconsistent is the inconsistent nature of the deals done between distributors and VOD operators. Sometimes, the VOD people would negotiate rights to single films, sometimes for access to catalogues. Sometimes, a movie would go to one platform exclusively and sometimes its rights holder might try to spread it about as thinly as it would go, to get as many eyes on it as possible. I opted to watch Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona(2008), on Amazon Prime.

It took quite a lot of time, a lot of trackpad-wrangling, to work out how to access Amazon’s hoard of movies. Unlike the reasonably intuitive Netflix homepage, Amazon seemed to bury movies on demand among other products. A Spanish novelisation of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a secondhand DVD, an autographed 8x12 of the movie’s star Scarlett Johansson… By all means stream Vicky Cristina Barcelona if you want to, Amazon seemed to be saying to me, but why not buy a very best of Spanish guitar CD too?

Humphrey at the BFI explained why this might be. “As a standalone, streaming services are very difficult to make profitable and sustainable,” he said. “That’s why most of the big ones are connected to another business. iTunes works as part of a wider Apple products universe, Sky’s supports the wider customer offer and Amazon Prime Video is deeply connected with Amazon’s retail business.”

As I delved further into my streaming options, I was asked to pay for my Allens in different ways. Netflix and Amazon took a monthly subscription fee (both £5.99) while the majority of other services asked a one-off payment to “rent” – as in to buy temporary access to a stream, usually for a period of about 48 hours. Streaming Woody Allen movies was an activity that rewarded bargain-hunting. Google wanted £2.49 for Celebrity (1998), Curzon Home Cinema £2.20 and iTunes and Amazon just 99p.

I was helped in this messy search process – of finding Manhattans and finding them cheapest – by a nifty website called JustWatch. Run by a German tech firm (its business built on collecting data about people’s viewing habits), JustWatch’s website functions roughly like a VOD-era Time Out or Radio Times. It sorted through the 34 Allen films that were available to stream on a dozen platforms and told me how much each would cost to watch.

When I got in touch with JustWatch’s chief executive, David Croyé, he said the site existed in part because of “a big oversupply of [streamable] content and a really fragmented market of where to watch it”. When I asked Croyé if there was a risk of a surfeit when it came to VOD – the consumer choked by consumables – he said: “Big time.”

Everyone I spoke to in the industry expressed some version of this concern. Mubi’s Cakarel said that VOD firms had to consider “an issue of drowning” and pointed out that his own service presented its subscribers with a neat choice of just 30 movies at any one time. “These films are chosen not by algorithms,” Cakarel said, “but by our programmers, who are out in the world, attending festivals, meeting film-makers.”

Mordecai at Curzon Home Cinema said his service limited its cache of streamable titles to a plumper 650, but added: “We have themed collections that help customers navigate those films. We also get respected directors and actors to curate collections for us. If you and your partner can’t agree on what to pick, then trusting a Palme d’Or winner saves an argument.”

Des Forges at the Independent Cinema Office said that, from the viewer’s perspective, the boom in streaming services had to be a good thing. At a time when a night out at the multiplex, let alone the grander cinemas, can cost £30 for two, the option to stream movies at home “lowers the barrier for entry”, she said. She thought that audiences might be more inclined to choose riskier, more unusual films at home-streaming prices too.

Technology has revolutionised movie watching but it has revolutionised movie-making too, and in a digital world, with production methods becoming ever cheaper, more films now arrive on the marketplace than in the past: somewhere between 18 and 22 a week, Des Forges said, as opposed to about half that number at the end of the 1990s. In a flooded market, it was increasingly difficult to give every film a worthy showing.

Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, now has his sights set on a movie-streaming service. Photograph: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Unless we were talking about one of the other big directors, most film-makers just want their films to be seen

Des Forges

Des Forges described a process whereby distributors bought up films in larger numbers than they used to, earmarking them for different destinations: some to be sold to cinemas, some to TV, some to VOD platforms. Des Forges called this speculating or hedging. Independent films have been prominent in the VOD revolution because, unlike their more expensive and oomphier studio equivalents, indie films are not so tightly bound to the traditional agreement between cinema operators and distributors that a new movie will get an unchallenged 17-week theatrical run before it is made available for home viewing.

I asked Des Forges about film-makers. What do they tend to think about their loving creations appearing not on the big screen but, perhaps, on the rather less grand Sony Bravia in my living room? Unless we were talking about Christopher Nolan or one of the other big directors, Des Forges said, “most film-makers just want their films to be seen”.

Could there come a time when all films become available for home viewing at the same time as their release in cinemas? Last month, about a year after the success of 45 Years, Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie was given the same treatment – £13 for a ticket at Everyman Leeds, £4.50 for a stream on BFI Player. It made more than £600,000 inside a month. Distributors around the country will have paid attention to this.

Meanwhile in America, in March, Napster founder Sean Parker announced plans for a start-up called the Screening Room, intending to make more big-budget studio films available to watch at home at the same time as they are released in cinemas. Parker’s proposed price for this – $50, or about £40, a pop – raised eyebrows, until people started calculating how much they spent getting a whole family along to the new Star Wars last Christmas.

Mordecai at Curzon thought the idea of walking into our living rooms “to find the latest instalment of Star Wars or X-Men available to stream the weekend of release is still a distant reality”. But Parker’s scheme had some prominent backers, at least back in March, including Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. So who knows.

Towards the end of my Woody Allen stream-binge I needed a break. One Friday evening, I browsed the choice of newer films on Curzon Home Cinema, looking through streamable titles that were also out in cinemas that week. After consulting my wife, we chose a documentary called The First Monday in May, which is about the staging of the lavish Met Gala in New York every spring. Telling as it did of neurotic and fragile Manhattanites, I thought it just about fitted the Woody theme.

Tax breaks and talent fuel UK’s creative industry boom

Read more

Simultaneously, that night, there were people watching the same film at Curzons and other cinemas around the country. Tickets at about £15 each, plus extra for the prosecco icepoles or whatever. My wife and I watched the film in the living room for a cool tenner, all in. I wouldn’t have called the experience “boutique-y”. That afternoon, I’d streamed Antz, the animated feature featuring voice work by Woody Allen for my three-year-old and the couch still had the damp, biscuit-crumby sheen that tends to be left behind by the toddler at rest. Still, it was a cosy Friday night in, easy to arrange – nice. When I’d asked people in the VOD industry what they thought the future held for home streaming and the cinema, they spoke of virtual-reality goggles, of “smart contact lenses”.

But maybe this was a more likely vision of the future, for better or worse: a further domestication of movie watching. Premieres in our pyjamas. The new Star Wars on the sofa. Maybe we’d stop noticing the means of a film’s delivery entirely and get as much out of a feature played on a 4in screen as on a 40ft one.

When the fashion doc had finished, I thought I’d top off the evening with one last Allen film – Sweet and Lowdown, which I hadn’t watched for years. I’d once waited six months to get a hold of a copy of it on VHS. Now perhaps 90 seconds went by after the whim to see it struck before I had Sweet and Lowdown up and streaming on my laptop. Still wonderful, of course, whatever the format, however the means.

The best boutique cinemas

Conceived as a newsreel cinema in 1937, this art deco gem was built by Dixon Scott, great uncle of director Ridley. Today, cineasteslounge on leather sofas to watch the likes of Paterson, but it still makes room for newsreels.

A short tube ride from the garish dazzle of Leicester Square sits cinema’s equivalent of the corner shop, mainly staffed by volunteers, with profits channelled to various charities. There is a private screening room for up to 12 people.

The Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds This has been a Leeds institution for 102 years. An old-school box office points the way to a gaslit interior complete with balcony seating. But the Dolby digital sound system is bang up to date.

If there was an Oscar for programming, the GFT (juggling new releases, classics, cult favourites and talks) would be among the nominees. The auditorium’s raked flooring ensures everyone gets an unobstructed view. Xan Brooks

Stream on: a guide to the services, including Observer critic Guy Lodge’s pick of the menus

Catalogue: more than 50,000 films, from blockbusters to indie and arthouse titles. Amazon started producing its own films last year with Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and plans to increase this to 12 per year.

Available on: website or mobile app. Also on smart TVs, via Blu-ray players, games consoles or the Amazon Fire TV stick.

Cost: subscription is £5.99 a month with 30-day free trial or included with an Amazon Prime shopping subscription (£79 a year). Some streamable films are not included and incur an extra one-off rental fee. Non-subscribers can rent Amazon Video titles from £2.49.

Guy’s top five:April and the Extraordinary World ( steampunk-flavoured French animation), A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Black Coal, Thin Ice, Meet Me in St Louis, Rain (Joan Crawford hits the South Seas in gloriously humid 1932 melodrama).

Catalogue: mostly two years old or more. Netflix recently started producing its own movies for simultaneous theatre/streaming release, so far without much impact (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny, Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous 6). The UK catalogue is inferior to the US due to licensing restrictions.

Available on: website or mobile app and on smart TVs, games consoles and Blu‑ray players.

Catalogue: just 30 indie/cult/classic films are available at a time; one new film is released per day and is available for a month. It hosts seasons featuring particular actors or directors.

Available on: website or mobile app, smart TVs, games consoles.

Cost: £5.99 a month; 30-day free trial.

Guy’s five:The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Office Killer, The Others, Heremias (Book One, The Legend of the Lizard Princess) – iconoclastic Filipino auteur Lav Diaz mixes crime and psychology in a nine-hour epic, The Bishop’s Wife (Cary Grant as a very dapper angel in a slice of Christmas comfort viewing).

Catalogue: more than 300 films hand-picked by the British Film Institute from its cultural programme and the BFI National Archive. Runs parallel to seasonal programming at the BFI’s home on the South Bank.

Available on: website or mobile app, some smart TVs.

Cost: £4.99 a month with a 30-day free trial or pay-per-view films are available from £3.89. Some of the BFI catalogue is free.